Texas set to use new drug in Tuesday execution

Michael Graczyk, Associated Press

Published 5:37 pm, Sunday, April 3, 2011

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In this March 16, 2011 photo, Texas death row inmate Cleve Foster talks on a phone at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice outside Livingston, Texas. Foster, scheduled for execution Tuesday, was sent to death row for the murder of Nyaneur Pal, 30, a Sudanese refugee he met in a bar. He would be the first condemned prisoner in Texas to receive lethal injection using pentobarbital, which is being substituted as one the three drugs Texas uses for capital punishment. less

In this March 16, 2011 photo, Texas death row inmate Cleve Foster talks on a phone at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice outside Livingston, Texas. Foster, scheduled for execution ... more

Texas set to use new drug in Tuesday execution

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LIVINGSTON - Cleve Foster says he’s not afraid to die - but he doesn’t want to be a guinea pig.

Foster would be the first Texas inmate executed with a new drug in the nation’s busiest death penalty state if his lethal injection scheduled for Tuesday evening is carried out in Huntsville. It’s the most significant change in the execution procedure in Texas since the state switched from the electric chair when it resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, like other corrections agencies around the nation, has been unable to find a supplier of sodium thiopental, one of the three drugs it has been using in a lethal chemical mixture. The department announced last month it would begin using pentobarbital as a substitute. The sedative used in surgery and to euthanize animals is already used in executions in Ohio and Oklahoma.

In an interview from death row, Foster, 47, said he thinks Texas’ decision to switch is wrong.

“How can Texas use something said to not be fit to kill a dog?” Foster asked, embracing criticisms of the drug that have failed to convince courts to block its use in the other states.

Foster’s lawyers have challenged the switch and execution procedures in an attempt to stop his death. They questioned whether Texas prison officials properly followed state administrative procedures when they announced the drug switch and argued the state illegally purchased the drugs to be used with an invalid federal permit.

Foster, a former Army recruiter, and an his roommate Sheldon Ward were sentenced to death for the murder of Nyaneur Pal, a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee they met in a bar. Her body was found in a ditch on Valentine’s Day 2002. The men also were charged but never tried for the shooting death of Rachel Urnosky, 22, at her Fort Worth apartment in December 2001.

Foster came close to death in January. He was sitting in a small holding cell in the Texas death house at the Huntsville Unit prison when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped his execution to look at a late appeal from his lawyers.

“I looked at that gray door . . . the world’s busiest death chamber,” he said. “I thought: Man, there’s no good there.”

A week later, the high court rejected the appeal, allowing Foster’s execution to be reset for Tuesday.

“I’m not scared,” he said. “It’s hard to explain.”

He said he appreciated the dozens of letters he has received, many from religious groups, as his January date approached.